The main objective of the GOCO initiative is to compute high-accuracy and high-resolution global gravity field models from complementary gravity data sources:
The combination is done by superposition of full normal equations and applying optimized relative weighting strategies.
GOCO has been initiated in the frame of ESA's GOCE Data AO (project no. 4248), with the project partners responsible for the GOCE-only time-wise (TIM) models as the nucleus.
The GOCO consortium is composed of the following institutions, co-ordinated by the Institute of Astronomical and Physical Geodesy at Techinical University of Munich:
More information can be found under goco.eu.
GOCO06s is a satellite-only, global gravity field model up to degree and order 300, with secular and annual variations up to degree and order 200. It was produced by the GOCO Team (Technical University of Munich, University of Bonn, Graz University of Technology, Austrian Academy of Sciences, University of Bern) and is based on 1,160,000,000 observations from 19 satellites. The contributing satellite mission are: GOCE (TIM6 gradiometer observations), GRACE (ITSG-Grace2018s), kinematic orbits from Swarm A+B+C, TerraSAR-X, TanDEM-X, CHAMP, GRACE and GOCE and SLR observations to LAGEOS, LAGEOS 2, Starlette, Stella, AJISAI, LARES, LARETS, Etalon 1/2 and BLITS. The combination of the individual data sources is performed by on the basis of the full systems of normal equations, where the relative weighting between each constituent is determined by variance component estimation. In order to account for the polar gap of GOCE, the solution is Kaula-regularized after degree and order 150.
When using the data please cite:
Kvas, A., Brockmann, J. M., Krauss, S., Schubert, T., Gruber, T., Meyer, U., Mayer-Gürr, T., Schuh, W.-D., Jäggi, A., Pail, R. (2021). GOCO06s - a satellite-only global gravity field model. Earth System Science Data, 13(1), 99–118. doi.org/10.5194/essd-13-99-2021
Kvas, Andreas; Mayer-Gürr, Torsten; Krauss, Sandro; Brockmann, Jan Martin; Schubert, Till; Schuh, Wolf-Dieter; Pail, Roland; Gruber, Thomas; Jäggi, Adrian; Meyer, Ulrich (2019): The satellite-only gravity field model GOCO06s. GFZ Data Services. http://doi.org/10.5880/ICGEM.2019.002
Available data sets: